Oops we did it again
The US military bombed a second school in Iran on the same day
The New York Times just posted a story about another awful targeting error, also on the first day of the war, also in southern Iran, also hitting a school, also right next to an IRGC compound, also killing many young girls. The difference is that this time it was an Army Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) rather than a Navy Tomahawk, so this is a truly multidomain fuck up.
Stand by for a lot of conspiracy theory about this one. Hitting one school can be written off as a tragic coincidence based on negiligent intelligence work. Hitting two schools on the same day starts to look like a pattern.
But what is the pattern? Here are two pictures from the NYT. The first is the school in Minab hit by the Tomahawk(s), where the girls were in class, and the second is the school in Lamerd hit by the PrSM, where the girls were playing volleyball. They are eerily similar, with the school in the corner.
Some will see evidence that the US military is deliberately hitting schools, which is a war crime. I don’t buy this interpretation because it very much plays against type (of the hyper rationalist and legalist targeting processes of the US miltiary that for the same reason sometimes makes some horribly myopic mistakes).
Some will see evidence that the Iranian military has a bad habit of turning parts of its bases into schools. What is going on here? Were the schools originally created for IRGC kids? Does the IRGC cynically hope to use schools as shields, or even more cynically to provoke a war crime? Is it just cheap real estate and a horrific coincidence? I don’t know.
Some will also see evidence of legacy target development in an intelligence database. Once again, there is probably a big rectangle drawn around the whole compound, in ignorance that one corner was turned into a school ten or so years ago. The target was probably marked as “no change” by whatever analyst(s) reviewed recent imagery during routine target scrub(s). I lean in this direction, i.e., that Lamerd is probably a good-old-fashioned intelligence failure like Minab, all within a heady atmosphere of quick-turn planning and accellerated timelines, based ultimately in unrealistic strategic ideas about how the war might unforld. But I admit that the coincidence is curious.
Some will also see evidence of a rush to strike one thousand targets (T1K!) with the help of AI. If AI was involved, I still think that it was at most pulling from a database of human-validated targets and perhaps contributing to a process that was rushed more than it should have been. But with the new target in Lamerd hit by the Army’s long range PrSM rocket, the case for AI involvement is marginally stronger. The Maven Support System after all was experimentally developed with the 18th Airborne Corps for managing surface-to-surface fires. So the speculative link is closer, but still extremely speculative. (Bear in mind again that the targeting AI in Maven is not Claude, but a more bespoke image classifier or planner adapted for the purpose by Palantir).
It is also possible that Lamerd is not, or not only, an intelligence failure, but an operational mistake. Compare in the photos above that the rest of the IRGC facility seems to be untouched, while the damage is to the civilian school and residential area. This is very different than the Minab strike, where all the IRGC buildings are hit too. So maybe the PrSM rounds were not very precise.
While the reputation of weapons offices is not something I generally worry about much, this is pretty embarassing for the PrSM program. According to the NYT, “On March 1, U.S. Central Command posted a video of a PrSM launch from the first 24 hours of the war. Days later, Adm. Brad Cooper, who leads Central Command, said the PrSM had been used in combat for the first time. The military has been touting its debut. Since the weapon is so new, it’s more difficult to assess whether the PrSM strikes in Lamerd were intentional, stemmed from a design flaw or manufacturing defect, or were the result of improper target selection.” PrSM is so new that I had to look it up. The Lockheed-Martin page crows, “The Precision Strike Missile is the next generation in our family of precision-strike, surface-to-surface weapon systems that support deterrence and deliver enhanced capabilities for neutralizing, suppressing and destroying targets at depth.” Ouch. Precise enough to strike families, more like. The misplaced warnography is not a good debut for a new weapon, but perhaps it is emblematic of this whole war in its way.
Finally, some will see evidence that Operation Epic Fury is not quite the operational success it has been represented to be. And that would be fair. Mistakes happen in war, but multiple mistakes like this ought not to happen. Both incidents may just be really bad luck, but these errors are a huge black eye—really two black eyes—on what otherwise seemed like an impressive military effort in the first day or two. Yet as the divergence between strategic planning and military operations becomes all the more glaring as the war drags on, these new blemishes in the opening days become important harbingers of the unfolding disaster. A politically foolish war is NOT likely to be won even if the military operation is flawless, but now even that must be in doubt. I’m not exactly sure what the discount factor is for morally outrageous mistakes against complicated military campaigns, but it must be even larger when the strategic management of the war is unconscionable as well.
There is still a lot we do not know, and we should be careful to qualify speculation about what happened. I imagine that we will learn more in the days ahead. There will be an investigation if there is not one already. We are still waiting to learn more from the other investigation, of course. While the news might not be as bad as conspiracy theorists or state propagandists will immediately assume, it is all still really bad.
[a few typos corrected and the difference between the targets clarified]